This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 15)

We've split TWiA into two parts again this week, because reactions to Rand Paul's presidential announcement are by themselves the length of a long installment. That post should go live about an hour after this one. Between now and next week's TWiA, we expect announcements from Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio, so more next week.

This Week in Economics

The conservative economic plan rests on three legs: cut taxes, cut spending, reduce regulation. We've seen various attempts to do that at the national level, with devastating consequences, as in the Bush recession of 2007-08. But many on the right argue that it didn't work because Bush didn't cut spending enough. It's true that he didn't follow through on that side very well, in part because he got us into two wars, then kept the spending for those wars from being part of the official national budget, so it was massive spending without any revenue increase being factored in to pay for it.

In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback decided to show the country how it's really done. He and a friendly state legislature instituted a conservative's economic dream; what Brownback called a "real-life experiment."

Real-life Kansans paid the price. Back in March 2014, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities summed up the Kansas disaster this way: "Tax cuts enacted in Kansas in 2012 were among the largest ever enacted by any state, and have since been held up by tax-cut proponents in other states as a model worth replicating. In truth, Kansas is a cautionary tale, not a model. As other states recover from the recent recession and turn toward the future, Kansas’ huge tax cuts have left that state’s schools and other public services stuck in the recession, and declining further — a serious threat to the state’s long-term economic vitality. Meanwhile, promises of immediate economic improvement have utterly failed to materialize."

The linked article is detailed and specific, going point by point over the changes and what they've done to the state's economy. True to conservative dogma, the tax cuts were designed to favor the wealthy. "Most state revenue systems require middle- and low-income families to pay larger shares of their incomes in taxes than high-income families — the exact opposite of what fairness might dictate. That’s true in Kansas, where the lowest income fifth of families pay 10.3 percent of their income in state and local taxes, on average, while the highest-income one percent of taxpayers pay just 3.9 percent.[17] In this way, state and local tax systems exacerbate the country’s already high levels of income inequality."

And: "The 2012 tax package actually raised taxes for the lowest-income households. Not only did they benefit much less from the rate reductions, but Kansas also eliminated some tax credits that helped low-income families in particular, including a rebate for sales taxes on food purchases. (The state partially restored the rebate in 2013, but not for the lowest-income households.)"

As part of the 2013 tweaks the state raised its sales tax rate, to help make up some of the budget shortfall. Sales taxes, of course, hit hardest as a share of income on the poor and middle class, thereby shifting yet more of the burden onto them in order to protect the tax cuts for the rich.

The result? Job growth in Kansas lagged behind the rest of the country. Businesses suffered. State services were slashed.

Still, Brownback and his friends at the capitol held strong. Just a couple of weeks ago, Brownback said, "It's working."

That, we suppose, depends on your definition of "working." If the goal is increased inequality, falling educational standards, flat wages, a shrinking economy relative to the states around you, closed libraries and parks--but smaller income tax bills for the richest among you, then it's working just fine.

That would not be our goal, though.

This week, we got more news of Kansas's economic miracle. "Lawmakers must fill a $344 million revenue shortfall by June, and Brownback has moved to plug Kansas’ fiscal hole by slashing education funding, gutting the state’s pension fund, and cutting infrastructure. Additionally, the governor has proposed new sales taxes, which disproportionately impact the poor, in order to proceed full steam ahead with his income tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy."

In other words, slamming the wage-earners harder than ever to shield the rich.

Meanwhile, they keep looking to schools to help balance things out. Having already imposed some of the most extreme educational cuts in the nation, they're planning on more, slicing an additional $51 million in funding that schools were expecting to receive. Some school districts are having to end their school years early because they simply can't afford to keep the doors open and the lights on.

Brownback's "real-life experiment" has played out just the way we would expect, based on history. The conservative economic agenda widens the gap between the rich and everyone else, and keeps tax bills low for the wealthiest. But even the rich do better when the economy is growing, and austerity measures don't grow economies. Over the long term, as schools fail to educate the young, prospects for growth become worse and worse.

It's fine for conservatives to continue to believe in an economic theory that is either disastrous for the people (or, conversely, succeeds brilliantly for the only people conservatives give a damn about). But as long as they do, they should be kept away from real power, for the good of us all.

* * *

Here are four programs in which more government spending has a direct deficit-reducing impact. The Republican "deficit hawks" who put together the House and Senate versions of the current budget cut them all, thereby increasing the deficit. Another thing those same congressional Republicans proposed is repealing the estate tax. The nonpartisan Congressional Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation scored the legislation on the table, and determined that it would add about $270 billion to the deficit. Just more evidence that they don't understand economics, or their concern about deficits is phony. Or, you know, both.

* * *

All those welfare programs that help poor people dine on caviar and champagne are really costing the taxpayers plenty, aren't they?

Actually, no. "But one result of this reality is that we have even less tolerance for programs that help the poor: We begrudge them their housing vouchers, for instance, even though government spends about four times as much subsidizing housing for upper-income homeowners."

But welfare for the rich is kind of costly. And they actually can dine on caviar and champagne, at our expense.

More below the fold, including hearts and minds, tainted food, religion, irony, and bears. Keep reading!

This Week in Changing Hearts and Minds

It is possible for people to move away from long-held positions that were, not so long ago, central to their views of themselves. Here are two such stories, one from this week and one older.

A former gun enthusiast writes a powerful piece on how he fell out of love with guns, and what happened when he decided to sell his small collection.

And here's a similarly well thought-out piece by a former Republican who--his eyes opened by close encounters with truths some find obvious--has left that party behind. "My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their 'just' desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way. I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into 'creat[ing] our own reality,' into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics, and why they won’t let a campaign 'be dictated by fact-checkers' (as a Romney pollster put it). It explains why study after study shows — examples here, here, and here – that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all."

There continue to be those in the media and among regular folks who have a "pox on both their houses" attitude, who distrust government and politicians of every stripe and assume that they're all dishonest and only out for themselves.

We beg to differ. Yes, there are dishonest politicians across the political spectrum. There are no doubt honest ones on every side, as well. But as Norman Orenstein and Thomas Mann of the American Enterprise Institute--itself a far-right organization--point out, today's conservatives are a special breed.

"We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

"When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges."

Only the right panders to racists and bigots. Only the right seeks to achieve electoral victory by denying Americans their legitimate power to vote. Only the right pursues an economic agenda designed to reward the rich and punish the rest. Only the right denies climate science, economic science, evolution, and more--and uses their massive media machine to deliberately mislead the public into believing as they do. The vast majority of violent domestic terrorism emanates from the right, and the extremist views held by those who perpetrate it are echoed by elected Republicans at every level.

Whatever their faults--and there are plenty--Democrats belong to a party that refuses to kowtow to racists, much less deliberately disenfranchise minority voters for electoral advantage. Democrats disagree on what to do about climate change, but not about its fundamental reality. Democrats hold a wide variety of economic beliefs, but by and large the party's leadership accepts economic reality. Democrats value diversity, and are never organized enough to march in lockstep even if they wanted to.

There are differences, vast ones, between the political parties, and between the conservative/progressive movements that undergird them. Saying they're all the same is to deny a fundamental truth about the nation we live in today.

This Week in Gun Safety

Speaking of guns, a just-released study has some disturbing findings. The Washington Post reports:

"Roughly 22 million Americans -- 8.9 percent of the adult population-- have impulsive anger issues and easy access to guns. 3.7 million of these angry gun owners routinely carry their guns in public. And very few of them are subject to current mental health-based gun ownership restrictions.

"Those are the key findings of a new study by researchers from Harvard, Columbia and Duke University. 'Anger,' in this study, doesn't simply mean garden-variety aggravation. It means explosive, uncontrollable rage, as measured by responses to the National Comorbidity Survey Replication in the early 2000s. It is 'impulsive, out of control, destructive, harmful,' lead author Jeffrey Swanson of Duke University said in an interview. 'You and I might shout. These individuals break and smash things and get into physical fights, punch someone in the nose.'"

The piece continues:

"In addition to the startling findings about the share of the overall population with both gun access and serious anger issues, the researchers also found that people with lots of guns -- six or more -- are more likely to carry their guns in public and to have a history of anger issues. And people with more than 11 were significantly more likely to say that they lose their temper and get into fights than members of any other gun ownership group."

Could this kind of research lead to a safer country? The authors suggest that it could. The pro-gun death lobby won't allow any restrictions whatsoever on gun accessibility, and a cowed Congress refuses to buck them. But if the range of offenses that make gun ownership prohibited were expanded to cover more of those common to this impulsively angry group, it might take guns out of the hands of people most likely to use them on other people.

Of course, closing background check loopholes would still be necessary, and the gun lobby won't let that happen, either. So Americans will keep dying by the tens of thousands every year, in order to keep the profits flowing to the arms industry.

* * *

The NRA is holding their annual celebration of murder in Tennessee* this weekend. Yes, there's more to guns than lost human lives, but as their usefulness as tools declines in an age when more meat comes from supermarkets than forests, the NRA becomes more and more radical in its insistence that more guns in more places makes people safer.

The opposite is true.

This Washington Post piece points out a significant flaw in the NRA's oft-stated position that the best defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. American children are "nine times more likely to die in gun accidents than children anywhere else in the developed world."

Does NRA shill and accessory to mass murder Wayne LaPierre think that every time a two-year-old accidentally aims Mommy's gun at his brother, there should be someone else on hand with a gun, to take the kid out before he can pull the trigger? Oddly, the NRA is reluctant to address this issue.

As the piece reports, "Because of this difficulty, each time the NRA has been confronted with the child-death problem, it has adopted what might be called a 'Look—what’s that over there?' strategy. The organization tries to paint media coverage of the deaths as the true problem; when a 9-year old killed her shooting range instructor with an Uzi, the NRA called the outcry 'exploitative' and a 'trick' by 'anti-gun advocates in the media.' Alternatively, spokespeople point to other ways children die, and other kinds of gun deaths, to downplay the seriousness of the issue. The NRA has a habit of suddenly become very interested in bicycle accident statistics when the issue is raised, and Gun Owners of America insists that children are 'more likely to die by choking on their dinner,' as if choking deaths is at all pertinent to gun deaths. Occasionally, they go as far as Tennessee State Rep. Glen Casada, who when speaking in support of the state’s new NRA-promoted guns-in parks bill, called these deaths 'acts of God,' about which nothing could possibly be done."

*Side Note: In Tennessee, gun deaths outnumber automobile deaths.

This Week in Food Safety

The Bush administration's lax approach to federal regulations resulted in some significant food safety issues. In 2010, a Democratic-led Congress passed " a sweeping overhaul of the nation's food-safety system, approved by both chambers with bipartisan support." But in 2011, Republicans took over Congress. The New York Times reports, "The Congressional Budget Office said the F.D.A. would need a total of $580 million from 2011 to 2015 to carry out the changes required by the Food Safety Modernization Act. So far, Congress has appropriated less than half of that amount, even as the agency is moving to issue crucial rules under the law this year."

At Maddowblog, Steve Benen describes how that's being received in the House.

"The GOP-led House held a committee hearing in March on funding the effort and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said the budget request for food safety 'will be tough to swallow.'”

"Congressman, I don’t know if you were playing with irony, but you know what’s actually 'tough to swallow'? Tainted food."

Benen also points out that this is another area where a little judicious spending can save a lot. When preventable illnesses strike wide swaths of the population, the cost far outweighs the price of more safety inspections. And that's just the financial implications. Americans shouldn't have to worry that dinnertime might make them sick.

This Week in War

Before launching the decade-long disaster that was the Iraq War, neocons told us again and again that it would be quick and easy. They were, quite clearly, very wrong.

Iran is the biggest, most powerful country in the Middle East (in no small part because we removed their chief rival from contention). We're trying, through diplomatic means, to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons. But Sen. Tom Cotton, whose lust for war is turning rapidly from curious to terrifying, has tried to sabotage that diplomacy. This week, he went on the radio show of a designated hate group and told lies that sound dangerously like those pre-Iraq lies.

Cotton is, of course, very wrong. Air strikes against Iran would be met with a forceful reaction from a country with a much more vital military than Iraq had. Iran is not an artificial construct cobbled together by British or French imperialists a hundred years ago, in which Sunnis and Shiites have been forced to grudgingly coexist, but a cohesive nation with a history much, much longer than ours, and an educated and sophisticated populace. Their response to American air strikes would be essentially similar to what our response would be to air strikes by some foreign power. Not only would they shoot down our planes, but any attack on them would no doubt rally the population behind their hard-line leaders and intensify their nuclear weapons program. Nuclear weapons are seen as a deterrent, and when a country is attacked or threatened with attack, they look for whatever deterrents they can get.

Cotton's scheme would embroil us in yet another Middle Eastern war, costing more trillions, costing more lives, and it would achieve exactly the opposite of the result he claims to want. Every week, Cotton is sounding more and more like the bomb-hungry General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It would be nice to think of Stanley Kubrick's Cold War dark comedy as a historical relic; instead, warmongers like Cotton threaten to make it relevant once more.

This Week in Climate

When Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) reportedly ordered state officials not to mention climate change and the public found out about it, Scott was at least embarrassed enough by his own stupidity and short-sightedness (Miami is one of the major cities most threatened by sea-level rise. Miami, in case the governor has forgotten, in in Florida) to deny having so ordered.

Not so in Gov. Scott Walker's (R) Wisconsin. They're right up front about it there. The Republican state treasurer has pushed through a rule preventing members of the state's Board of Commissioners of Public Lands from discussing or doing any work related to climate change, including answering emails from the public about it. Among other tasks, that board is charged with overseeing Wisconsin's vast forests, which are directly impacted by climate change.

Tia Nelson, the board's executive director has done work on climate change, and she knows whereof she speaks. "Nelson is the daughter of Gaylord Nelson, the U.S. Senator from Wisconsin who established Earth Day in 1970. For 17 years before joining the public land agency, she ran the Nature Conservancy's climate change initiative."

Putting your hands over your ears and screaming in order to avoid hearing about a problem is supposed to be a tactic you give up when you're four or five years old. Refusing to let officials discuss or work on climate change issues doesn't make the erroneous belief that climate change isn't real come true. It is real, and any state official who doesn't want members of state government to accept that is doing an incredible disservice to the residents of that state--and to the rest of the world, because climate doesn't observe state boundaries.
(Thanks to TWiA special climate correspondent Marcy Rockwell for the tip.)

This Week in Religion

Many on the right have tried for years to paint President Obama as a "secret Muslim," even though all through the 2008 campaign they complained about his 20-year attendance of a particular Christian church. Some of them are still at it--in February, former governor and likely presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (R/AR) said of the president, "Everything he does is against what Christians stand for, and he’s against the Jews in Israel. The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the radical Muslim community or the more moderate Muslim community."

Fact is, Israelis like Obama quite a bit more than most of the world's Muslims do, so Huckabee's flat wrong.

And just this week, the pastor who introduced Rand Paul at his big announcement speech said, "In five years we’ll find out what [Obama’s] real religion is. I think the evidence of his actions are not friendly toward Christians. Once he’s out, he will ‘evolve’ like he did on gay marriage. I just believe that’s what he will do."

But at his Easter prayer breakfast (yes, the secret Muslim held an Easter prayer breakfast at the White House), Obama said:

"For me, the celebration of Easter puts our earthly concerns into perspective. With humility and with awe, we give thanks to the extraordinary sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our Savior. We reflect on the brutal pain that He suffered, the scorn that He absorbed, the sins that He bore, this extraordinary gift of salvation that He gave to us. And we try, as best we can, to comprehend the darkness that He endured so that we might receive God’s light.

"And yet, even as we grapple with the sheer enormity of Jesus’s sacrifice, on Easter we can't lose sight of the fact that the story didn’t end on Friday. The story keeps on going. On Sunday comes the glorious Resurrection of our Savior."

He closed with this: "So today, we celebrate the magnificent glory of our risen Savior. I pray that we will live up to His example. I pray that I will live up to His example. I fall short so often. Every day I try to do better. I pray that we will be strengthened by His eternal love. I pray that we will be worthy of His many blessings."

Did the right wing come out and say, okay, maybe this guy's a Christian after all?

Fat chance.

Instead, they focused on a joking aside in which he mentioned some "less than loving expressions by Christians," and went on to demonstrate exactly what he meant by that.

It's unlikely that those folks are reading TWiA (though they should be), but if they were, we'd tell them that the president is unequivocally a Christian. His public pronouncements, not to mention his actions, are proof of that. He has mentioned Jesus in speeches more times than President George W. Bush ever did.

But the right wants to paint him as an "other," a foreigner, somebody outside the American mainstream. They've never done this with any previous president. They weren't fond of Bill Clinton, but they never tried to say he was from another country or practiced another faith. What's different about Barack Obama?

Couldn't have to do with race, could it?

This Week in Irony

Former Vice President Dick Cheney--who was instrumental in lying to promote an unnecessary war that cost trillions of dollars and countless lives (including those of 4,500 American service members), promoting torture as an American ideal, and nearly cratering the American economy, said this about President Obama this week: “I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing,”

We tend to think that an America with a vastly improved economy, that doesn't torture, that's once again respected around the world, and that tries to avoid wars rather than willfully misleading the public into supporting them, is an America that has come up considerably from the depths to which the previous administration sank it.

This Week in Arizona

RIP Raul Castro--not Fidel's brother, but Arizona's one and only Latino governor, who we lost this week at 98. He was one of the most inspiring men we've ever met.

* * *

The Arizona Daily Sun reports, "During the recession, Arizona cut state funding to its universities on a percentage basis by more than any other state. In the last five years tuition and mandatory fees for state residents at Arizona State University has increased 25 percent to the current level of $10,157 for new students. The $10,957 figure for the University of Arizona is up 33 percent over the same period; a 30 percent increase at Northern Arizona University translates to current tuition of $9,989."

Republican governor Doug Ducey's response?

"'I urge you to approach this endeavor in a businesslike fashion when considering whether to raise prices,' he said. Ducey told the regents they should examine the proposals critically and look at alternatives to higher tuition, like cutting administrative costs and eliminating 'programs that do not work.'

"And the governor suggested that price may trump everything else.

"'In business, making a quality product that fewer can afford does not often make sense,' he said."

Ducey told the regents that the universities couldn't count on state aid.

Ducey seems to be operating under a fundamental misunderstanding here. State university systems were never meant to be businesses. They were meant to be State. University. Systems. First word there? "State." The whole point was for these universities to be accessible to residents of any given state, to serve those who couldn't afford private universities. They were to be--and throughout America's history, since the University of Georgia was chartered in 1785, have been--supported by state funds, under the belief that there is value to having an educated populace, and that the state as a whole benefits from it.

If state universities can't count on funding from the state, what's the difference between those and private universities?

As is so often the case, much of the blame lies with the voters. There's a perception, especially on the right, that business executives make good elected officials. The truth is, that's very rarely the case. In business, the goal is to make a profit. In government, that's not the goal. In government, the goal is to serve the people that government represents. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Ducey served as treasurer of Arizona during the time the state's financial shortfall became extreme (the shortfall he's now blaming for slashing education funding). If he had argued to the governor and legislature then that cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations was a stupid idea that would, quite obviously, harm the state's budget, we never heard about it. But during his campaign, he focused on his business career, running Cold Stone Creamery.

That business might have been a success, but after that, he was party to running Arizona's economy into the ground.

And he was elected governor anyway. Because too many conservative voters don't understand there's a difference between the goals of an ice cream business and a state.

Ducey is, himself, a product of Arizona State University, which he attended back when state universities were inexpensive. His Democratic opponent in the election, Fred DuVal, had served as chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents. He is, in other words, someone who understands the value of state universities. Arizona's voters decided that an educated citizenry doesn't matter.

* * *

In other Arizona news, Maricopa County taxpayers are on the hook for another $3.5 million, thanks to the disinterest of America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM in investigating sex crimes against children. The details are too awful to go into here, but here are the basics, as reported by the Arizona Republic:

"Maricopa County will pay a $3.5 million settlement to the family of a girl whose abuser was allowed to walk free for nearly five years while the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office ignored physical evidence from the assault.

"The case was one of more than 400 sexual-abuse and -assault cases that the Sheriff's Office admitted mishandling from roughly 2005 to 2007.

"In this instance, Patrick J. Morrison, 51, eventually pleaded guilty in 2012 to three counts of child molestation against his niece, Sabrina, who is developmentally disabled. The girl first reported the molestation five years earlier in 2007, but deputies closed her case in 2008 even though physical evidence supported her story."

The Republic goes on to describe some of the financial toll--though not the human one--Maricopa County residents have inflicted upon themselves by repeatedly electing this waste of skin.

"The settlement is the latest in a long string of million-dollar-plus payouts as a result of Sheriff's Office actions. Two inmate death cases, one in 1996 and one in 2001, resulted in payouts of $8 million and $6 million, respectively. More recently, the county paid $1.2 million to the family of a man who was struck and killed by a sleep-deprived deputy in 2009, and the state department of Correctional Health Services paid out $3.25 million in 2012 to the family of a diabetic inmate who died in custody.

"In addition, the county has paid out millions more in settlements involving Sheriff Joe Arpaio's immigration enforcement actions, and at least $44 million to settle claims by county officials who were targeted in a political vendetta by Arpaio and former County Attorney Andrew Thomas.

"In 2013, Maricopa County agreed to pay more in insurance premiums for the upcoming year because it was becoming increasingly difficult to find insurance carriers based on the county's exposure to legal claims.

"The county at that time paid $2.3 million to renew its insurance policies, which pays for up to $55 million in insurance coverage for the county through six companies.

"Part of the increase was because the county had to pay for coverage from two companies for its excess-liability plan. The liability plan covers claims that exceed the $5 million limit that can be paid out by the county's self-insured risk trust fund.

"At the time, county administrators also decided to use two new insurance companies to cover sheriff-related claims and non-sheriff related claims."

America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM is a semi-human malignancy, a thug with a badge who shames the entire state. He should have been retired by the voters after his first term, if not earlier.

This Week in Bears

Can't blame him for that. Those chocolate bunnies are delicious. "Caroline Tidwell of Estero, Florida woke up Friday to see a 300-400 pound black bear relaxing in her living room, NBC-2 reported. Tidwell initially was afraid the bear was chowing down on her cats, but it turned out the only thing the animal consumed while in her home was her family’s Easter candy." (via the Huffington Post)

A nameless black bear cub was injured near Payson, AZ last year, nursed back to health at a facility in Scottsdale, and now, healthy and whole, lives at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside of Tucson. But she still doesn't have a name. That's where you come in. You can vote on one--the choices are Ursula, Strawberry, and Judumi--here, until April 15. Forget about those taxes, naming the adorable bear cub is more important!